The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness is a photo-, text-, and video-based investigation into varied articulations of incompleteness and vertical phasing in the built landscape internationally. Giving attention to the broader implications of deliberately phased construction which allows for the occupation of buildings or activation of structures that appear to be continually in the process of becoming, this investigation is characterized by an interdisciplinary line of inquiry engaging with the expanded meanings adjacent to these complex and sometimes contradictory practices in perpetuity. Instead of taking a reductionist approach, this investigation asks: How can we read these objects in a different way? How can we understand these objects freely, allowing ourselves to use a multiplicity of vocabularies and points of reference? This is not a study of the “creativity of the poor” or an attempt to improve design practice; by way of contrast, this exhibition advances a critique of the “learning from...” methodology alongside numerous efforts to produce understandings for which we may not have immediate use.

Joseph Redwood-Martinez is an artist, writer, and filmmaker from the United States. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Modern Painters, and The Huffington Post. A book of his recent writing, event statements, was published in April 2011 by Publication Studio. A forthcoming book titled neo-provincialism will be released in 2014. He has shown work and curated programs in Sweden, Germany, India, Turkey, the UK, and the United States. In 2011-12, he was a curatorial fellow at SALT in Istanbul. One day, everything will be free is his first film.